Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

February 29, 2008

An African American-Hispanic racial controversy has risen its ugly head this Leap Day deep in the heart of Texas. “Obama simply has a problem that he happens to be black,” said Adelfa Callejo, a lawyer and civil rights activist who supports Hillary Clinton. In an interview Wednesday night with The Dallas Morning News, Mrs. Callejo said many Hispanics have told her that they have reservations about voting for a black politician because of fights over funding in the Dallas school district. "What I hear is that they do not trust that Obama will do something for Hispanics," Mrs. Callejo said. In response to the statement, Camp Clinton spit out an echo from Tuesday's Democratic debate in Ohio, announcing that the former First Lady “denounces and rejects” Mrs. Callejo’s assertions about Obama. As it turns out, Mrs. Callejo is 84 years old. Her anti-black expression may be more generational than typical. Younger Hispanics have been supporting Obama while older ones have been with Clinton. Other Hispanics may want to go with a winner. There is another division between African Americans and Mexican Americans which Mrs. Callejo didn’t address: Second and third generation Hispanics are much more accepting of blacks than the newly-arrived and the undocumented. Here’s my op-ed page column I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times nearly a year and a half ago.

Mexican immigrants bring negative image of blacks

July 21, 2006BY MONROE ANDERSON

In Mexico, the n-word is negritos. The word, which refers to dark-skinned Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike, does not carry the virulent, vicious hatred it historically has stateside. Some argue that the word, which loosely translates into little black people, is more like a term of endearment. That’s the same argument the hip-hop set employs to defend the use of the United States’ very own n-word. Last year, President Vicente Fox didn’t use either Mexico’s word or ours when he defended his government’s sale of the minstrel-modeled cartoon character Memin Pinguin on a commemorative stamp. Nor was he reported to have used either word when he said last year that “there is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing the jobs the not even blacks want to do there in the United States.”They say it’s the thought that counts, and as it turns out, El Presidente may have been expressing what his fellow countrymen think. At least, that’s what I concluded after reading the results of a new study released in the August issue of the Journal of Politics.

The 2003 survey, conducted in Durham, N.C., found that Mexican immigrants come to the United States with negative stereotypes of black Americans. According to the Duke University study, “Racial Distancing in a Southern City: Latino Immigrants’ Views of Black Americans,” a majority of Latino immigrants, almost all from Mexico, believed that black Americans were lazy liars. A third of the immigrants believed African Americans to be troublesome.

Among those immigrants surveyed, 58.9 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks are hardworking”; 32.5 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks are easy to get along with,” and 56.9 percent felt that “few or almost no blacks could be trusted.”

The survey reveals that while more than half of the immigrants feel “they have the least in common with blacks,” more than three-fourths of those same respondents feel “they have the most in common with whites.”

But this is the era of the new South, and the feelings aren’t mutual. The study reports “that while 45.9 percent of white respondents see themselves as having the most in common with blacks, just 22.2 percent of whites see themselves as having the most in common with Latinos.”

To further distort this new paradigm of race relations, half of the blacks surveyed felt close to Latinos and half the blacks felt they had “the most in common with whites.”

Ironically, the white Southerners, whose ancestors authored the old black stereotypes, no longer subscribe to them. Only 9.3 percent of the whites “indicate that few or almost no blacks are hardworking; only 8.4 percent believe that few or almost no blacks are easy to get along with…”

“We were depressed about a lot of our study,” Duke University Professor Paula McClain, who headed the study, told me in a telephone interview, because the Latino immigrants are “not coming into this country with a blank slate on this issue.”

Mexico has a colonial past and all the racial baggage that historically comes with it. That many recent Mexican immigrants bring racist attitudes should come as no surprise. But as our nation moves forward, this backward thinking must be addressed in Durham, Chicago and nationwide. We have too many homegrown racists. We don’t need to import any more.

When the next wave of pro-illegal immigrant demonstrations sweeps our nation, I hope African-American leaders will have talked to Latino leaders about the need to talk to the new arrivals and explain to them that we’re all in this together. Such a bicultural, bilingual dialogue could forge a black-Mexican bond too powerful for words.